One evening four weeks back, Amadi and his slaves rose in a group, tucked away their carved bones, cowries, teapots and pipes, and shuffled their way to the stern, where Mungo stood beside Ned Rise, reminiscing about Bond Street and Drury Lane. Amadi spoke in Mandingo. They were three days out of Yaour, he said, but they would have to anchor for the night because there was a dangerous rapids just ahead. He would guide them through the rapids in the morning, and then begin making preparations for a landing at Yaour. Could he, he wondered, look through the things the explorer meant to give him in payment?
The slaves watched Mungo’s face as if it were something to eat. He didn’t want to think about Amadi’s leaving him, didn’t want to deal with it. He even thought of welshing, of holding a pistol to the guide’s head and forcing him to go on. But no, he couldn’t do that. His relations with the natives — insofar as he had any — had always been based on mutual trust. Amadi had fulfilled his part of the bargain, Mungo would stick by his. “All right,” he said finally, “we’ll hate to see you go, but I suppose there’s nothing to be done about it.” He looked at the guide hopefully, but Amadi’s face was signed, sealed and delivered. “Well. There’s no harm in your picking out what you want now — but remember, when we get to Yaour you’ve promised to find us a guide. Right?”
Amadi made a sign of obeisance, and then, shadowed by his slaves, ducked beneath the canopy to sort through the things that had survived M’Keal’s fit at Gotoijege. For a long while the explorer could hear them mumbling over this object or that, whistling in awe, debating in a low murmurous dialect he couldn’t understand. After an hour or so Mungo ordered Ned to drop anchor, and Amadi and his men retired to their customary spot in the bow of the boat. As it grew dark, the slaves huddled beneath their jubbahs and dozed off, but Amadi sat there, still as a corpse, his eyes scanning the shore, the glowing bowl of his pipe like a beacon in the gathering night.
In the morning he was gone.
Mungo couldn’t beheve it. He awoke to mist, the discourse of birds, M’Keal’s snores, and made his way to the front of the boat to heat some water for tea over the brazier they’d erected there. But something was wrong. The bow of the boat was empty, the curled black forms that had been propped there these past four and a half months until they seemed a part of the ship — knots in the wood, human anchors, furled sails — were gone. Vanished. As if someone had taken an eraser to the corner of a familiar portrait. It was disturbing. Deeply disturbing. Frantic, Mungo roused the men and hurriedly inventoried the supplies.
Three-quarters of the muskets had disappeared. Kegs of powder, bullets, every last scrap of broadcloth, every trinket and trifle — about the only thing they hadn’t taken was the clarinet Ned had inherited from Scott. Martyn was seething. “Damned aborigines, black coon Hottentot nigger thieves. They’ve swum off with it all, haven’t they?”
They had. Crocodiles or no crocodiles. And now the men of the Joliba were left without a guide, without goods for barter, and very nearly defenseless, their arsenal decimated and their number reduced by half. It looked bleak, but not so bleak as it would look five minutes later. Because by then a carefully orchestrated attack would be under way, an attack that would feature tooth-champing Maniana cannibals and weapons rendered useless by sabotage (Amadi had wet the powder in each of the muskets he was unable to carry off, and had almost certainly made some sort of nefarious compact with the Maniana). Later, Mungo would think back on the incident and realize that the guide must have planned it from the first, must have been communicating with the ghouls all along, must have sold them out as casually as one might auction off goats or chickens. Amadi was cold-blooded. Wicked. He’d stabbed them in the back.
Fortunately, however, at the first gastronomic howl from the bush, Ned Rise had had the presence of mind to sever the anchor rope, and the Joliba—wet muskets and all — was able to drift down out of danger just as the ochre-painted savages stormed out of the bushes with their skewers and carving knives.
♦ ♦ ♦
And so, here they are — guideless, cowryless, goodsless, anchorless, their clothes in rags and bodies devastated with disease, sunburn and culinary fatigue, the current carrying them where it will, the water level dropping as the dry season advances, sandbanks lapping at them like tongues, humped white rocks protruding from the sickly wash of the current like picked ribs, mites, flies, ticks, chiggers and mosquitoes biting, the odor of dead fish and exposed muck so rancid and oppressive they can hardly breathe — here they are, overjoyed, celebrating, heading south.
Perhaps Amadi’s betrayal has been good for them in a way, the explorer is thinking as he holds a match to his pipe and gazes out over the coruscating surface of the river. It’s brought them together as nothing else could — four stalwart never-say-die Britishers rallying to confront a slippery treacherous world of blackamoors, cannibals and backstabbing, two-timing negro lackeys. And they’ve done it. They’ve succeeded. Amadi’s treachery was the straw that didn’t break the camel’s back, didn’t even bow it. They can handle anything, they know that now. Rain, disease, open warfare, perfidy, the loss of friends and brothers and companions at arms, the heart-sinking uncertainty of following the river northward into the desert — they’ve been through it all. The rest will be nothing, a piece of cake.
It is at this juncture that the first shadow drifts across the explorer’s face — skirting the periphery of his consciousness like an insect hovering over a plate of pudding, and yet not quite intruding on it. His mind has made the associative leap from heading south to piece of cake to London, glory, Selkirk and Ailie, and he is scratching meditatively at his ankles, stuck on this last little imaginative nugget. Ailie. He wonders what she’s doing with herself, if she’s bored, angry, disappointed. She has every right to be disappointed, he’ll admit that. It’s been twenty months already, and how many more only God can tell. Poor thing. He can picture her pining away for him, haunting the post office, reading and rereading his Travels till the leaves dissolve. Well he’ll make it up to her. He will. She can come down to London while he writes the new book — dedicated to Zander, and to her of course — and he’ll give her anything she wants: a coach, jewelry, gowns, menservants, microscopes. . It is then that the second, third and fourth shadows flit across his face and he raises his eyes reflexively to scan the sky.
Ned has already seen them. Vultures. Eight, ten, twelve of them already, and more coming. Dispersed like leaves, they hang in the still air, wings stiff and mute, gliding, rocking, spinning over the boat as if they were part of some towering mobile. It is a convocation, a synod of scavengers. Black wings against white torsos, eyes like talons, the pedestrian Egyptian vultures circle beneath the big regal griffons, wings spread seven and a half feet across, and the even bigger Nubians that scrape the roof of the world like something left over from the age of reptiles. And now, rushing to them like remoras to sharks, like flying hyenas, are flocks of crows and kites and great gangling marabou storks with their beaks like butcher’s knives. In ten minutes the sky is dark with them, wheeling, silent, dozens upon dozens of hot yellow eyes intent on the blistered canopy and chiseled hull of the Joliba.